Seven Stages of Grief (The Life and Times of Jennifer Jareau)
by Arcturus-Sinclair
Summary: Take a peek into the lives of JJ's family and team as her sudden death rocks everything they've come to know. (Character death warning. Written for the May Death Challenge.)


[[A/N; Hey look! I'm back. And writing sad things, no surprise there. This was written for the Chit Chat on Author's Corner Death Fic Challenge. Hope you enjoy!]]

The psychologist told me writing would help me cope with my mother's death. But when you grow up around profilers all your life, you learn how to control your emotions; even analyze them. But hey, it's part of therapy and who knows, it might help.

I doubt it, but here I go. Let's start with my name and age. My name is Henry LaMontagne, and I'm sixteen years old. The year is 2025.  
And my mother Jennifer Jareau died in a car crash a week ago. They say I'm in denial, but I'm obviously not. I can't be, I'm not denying her death. I'm just denying what her death means for my family, for my younger sister. She's only five, she doesn't know what death is. And my father's been too angry to cry.

Way to skip the first stages of grief, Dad. But I guess I'm not writing this to talk about how stupid my father's being. Or is.  
I'm writing this because I'm not coping the way I should? Or that's what they told me, despite there being no way to cope. It's ridiculous, really. It's only been a week, what do they expect of me? The funeral was only three days ago. I've been to school, I've helped my dad out.

I haven't started self-harming (though I was tempted), I'm not binge-drinking. So I've been sleeping more than usual, I've also been doing more that usual. And if that didn't make me sound like a lazy teenager... Wow, there had to have been a better way to put that.

Anyway, like I was saying, I haven't done anything out of the ordinary since my mother died. Should I? Should I scream and rage and throw a fit?  
Will that bring her back? No, it won't. And I'm tired of pretending that she's just on a case. Tired of side-stepping my sister's questions.

People die, and the mortality rate for F.B.I agents are higher. (Yes, I did the research long before this. School projects.) But even quitting wouldn't have negated any chance of dying. After all, twelve thousand three hundred and forty two people die a day. Death happens, and us pretending it doesn't is just stupid.

Not to say that when they told me she was dead I didn't deny it at all. I did, I spent days denying it, refusing to accept that my mother was dead.  
But I stopped that; I fell back on logic. Because all my head shaking and denying wasn't doing me any good. All it did was make me stuck in one spot.  
But apparently that's wrong. I /should/ be reacting. I guess I should be throwing a fit, railing at the God that Uncle Spence and Uncle Dave taught me to believe in.

Damn people are stupid. Even my mother's team doesn't think I need therapy, they just told me to go along with it. So here I am, babbling in a stupid journal that I'll later have to type up because my handwriting is worse than my sister's.  
But anyway, I don't think therapy is some stupid thing that doesn't work, I know it does. But I also know how my family raised me, and how I had to understand some things a bit faster than most.

And one of those things I had to understand was, my mother had a dangerous job, and one day it might kill her.

And I learned just what that meant when I was ten and my mother was abducted. She spent three days held captive. We were all worried that she wouldn't make it out. And I learned that she could die, that my mother was not infallible.

And maybe that's when I had my brush with the stages of grief I'm supposed to be feeling now. Because I sure as hell went through denial then.  
That's not to say that I've skipped right to acceptance. I've just learned that while I cannot control my emotions, I can choose how I react to them. And for the sake of my sister, I'm choosing a non-reaction in public.

Instead I've spent more free time at the gym, working off my anger where my sister won't walk in and get upset. Or where my father won't lose his cool for the hundredth time this week. If I have to react to this; and I know I do, then I get to choose when and where I do it.  
But rather than doing anything useful, I'm lying on my bed, still writing. What am I even supposed to write about now? I already wrote down all my feelings about my mother.

I could talk about my father and how much of my time I spend wanting to punch him. I guess that's a bad thing, but he's on this stupid spiral. Like, he's supposed to be the supportive role right now, he's not supposed to be a wreck in front of us.

It's ridiculous really, I'm being forced into this shit, and here he is being a wreck and he gets pity. It's annoying.

I'd like to throw something at him and tell him to man up. Seriously, you've got a five year old that's seen you cry and yell more in the past week than she saw you and her mother cry in five years.

And that's a problem. Especially since no one's explained to her what Mom being gone means.  
I mean they told her that it was a doll being buried and that Mommy was away working. Just when I thought I couldn't want to punch him any more, he pulled that.

Note to self: talk to Uncle Spence about telling Penny something better than that. He'd be better at it than my Dad, hell, at this point anyone talking to her about it was better than my dad.

But hey, he's trying, I guess. Better than him pretending she was just away, and ignoring signs that pointed otherwise.  
But I'm done with this entry, I'll do more later. I need a shower and something to eat.

-HL


End file.
